Marsican bear vanishing with Italian wilderness

Photo / Thinkstock

ROME - Life is no picnic for bears in Italy these days.

Environmentalists have sounded the alarm for the Marsican bear, one of the world's rarest breeds, after an increase in the number of animals hit by trains and cars, shot by hunters and, in one case drowned in a water cistern.

The Marsican bear roams the forests and meadows of the Apennine mountains, which run down the spine of the Italian peninsula, and has become an emblem of the country's rapidly dwindling wilderness areas.

The stronghold of Ursus arctos marsicanus is a national park that straddles the regions of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise.

In the 1980s there was an estimated 80 to 100 bears but the most recent census found that the figure had dropped to just 50 - a level conservationists say is hardly enough to maintain a healthy gene pool.

"We're talking about a number that is clearly below the threshold of survival," said Giuseppe Rossi, head of the national park. Of the 50 remaining bears, some are lone males living in remote parts of the park, rarely coming into contact with females.

"The most important part of the gene pool is a group of 10 to 12 female bears of reproductive age," said Paolo Ciucci, a researcher from La Sapienza University in Rome.

"But if you consider that a bear can have cubs only every three years, and that three or four cubs are born each year, you begin to understand how narrow is the margin for saving the species from extinction."

While baby bears are few and far between, adults are shot by angry landowners when they raid beehives, orchards and gardens.

Last June two bears - a mother aged between 5 and 7, and an 18-month-old cub - fell into an open cistern on farmland and drowned.

Others are killed in accidents on the roads and railway lines which traverse the national park, are killed by trophy hunters or are inadvertently poisoned when they feed on baited animal carcasses intended for wolves.

Four years ago, three bears were poisoned, well within the borders of the national park.

One of them was called Bernardo - the 10-year-old bear was well known to the villagers of San Sebastiano, one of several villages in the park where he foraged for food, and had become a symbol of how bears and people could co-exist.

"When the park was founded in 1922, an average of 2.5 bears were killed each year," said Massimiliano Rocco of the Italian branch of WWF. "Between 1980 and 1985 the figure rose to five bears a year, before dropping down to 4.5 between 2007 and 2009."

The future of the Marsican bear may lie with a conservation initiative which aims to protect not only the rare sub-species but also the Alpine brown bear.

The €3.6 million ($6.4 million) Life Arctos project starts this year and is due to run until 2014. The funds will be used to set up a genetic database of Italy's wild bears and to limit their contact with humans by, for instance, putting electric fences around beehives and vegetable gardens to deter the beasts from foraging.

Volunteers will plant trees bearing fruit that the bears like, encouraging them to look for food in the mountains and woods.